Drilling wells for various purposes is well-known. Such wells may be drilled for geothermal purposes, to produce hydrocarbons (e.g., oil and gas), to produce water, and so on. Well depth may range from a few thousand feet to 25,000 feet or more.
In conventional oil well logging, during well drilling and/or after a well has been drilled, instruments may be conveyed into the borehole and used to determine one or more parameters of interest related to the formation. A rigid or non-rigid conveyance device is often used to convey the instruments, often as part of a tool or a set of tools, and the conveyance device may also provide communication channels for sending information up to the surface.
During or after drilling, these instruments in the wellbore are used in order to carry out any number of subterranean investigations of the earth formation or of infrastructure associated with the wellbore. Several instruments may be housed in a single tool, multiple tools may be connected on a single conveyance device, or both. Thus, the tools may include variety of sensors and/or electronics for formation evaluation, monitoring and controlling the instruments, monitoring and controlling the conveyance device, and so on. Aspects of control of these instruments to conduct investigations are carried out by electronics downhole and by control equipment and/or personnel at the well surface, which may be connected by a local area network (‘LAN’). Optionally, remotely located control equipment and/or personnel may send commands to logging instruments, e.g., over a wide-area network (‘WAN’).
A LAN is a computer network that spans a relatively small area. Many LANs are confined to a single building or group of buildings, or a single well site. However, one LAN can be connected to other LANs over any distance (e.g., via telephone lines, fiber networks, radio waves, etc.). A wide-area network (‘WAN’) is a system of LANs connected in this way. The Internet is an example of a WAN.